Two million is less than 1 percent of Yahoo's outstanding shares, but Jackson's grassroots quest attracted media attention, and one-third of the votes were cast against at least one of the directors. A 66 percent support level is a landslide in politics, but at a public corporation, where nearly 100 percent is the norm, it is an embarrassment of the highest order.

The dissident Jackson asked a series of impertinent questions: Does Semel still have fire in the belly? Is he okay with settling for second place behind Google? And shouldn't he have apologized to shareholders for his performance over the last two or three years? Semel accused Jackson of being "cute." Eventually, Semel became so defensive that he declared, "I feel very good about my capabilities."

Semel would not talk to Condé Nast Portfolio, nor would any other top executive at the company. A Yahoo spokesperson says, "Terry has no intention of leaving the company." And why should he? Yahoo's board of directors has lavished Semel with enormous wealth. Since he started on the job in May 2001, his total compensation has totaled more than half a billion dollars. That's billion with a b.

Last year alone, he was paid $107 million, or 14.3 percent of the company's net income, making him one of the highest-paid C.E.O.'s in the U.S. He's set to receive 6 million options worth $92 million in Yahoo stock through 2008 in a retention incentive granted by the board of directors last year. That is not the kind of pay package cooked up by a compensation committee that's thinking about replacing someone.

Yahoo has lost to Google in every way it possibly could. Google search is crushing Yahoo in market share. The company fell years behind Google in Web-advertising technology. And the bleakest statistic: Google had $10.6 billion in revenue last year, most of it in advertising, compared with Yahoo's $6.4 billion. When Semel took charge of Yahoo in 2001, Google was still a bit player.